Chatdeathbot

A diary, a ribbon-bound trove
Of old correspondence, love letters,
Notes written for you explicitly

By the cherished deceased, old photos,
Home movies, video messages—
Knowing all these, was there any doubt

The dead would be brought back as chatbots?
The only cheat, the creepy feature,
Is that the chatbot guesses the dead,

Doesn’t simply reply what the dead
Recorded, intended, wrote, or said.
That’s also the most tempting feature

For the living, if considering
What happened with Spiritualism.

H. fossilia

Wouldn’t it be charming if,
Given humans are the first
Culturally ratcheting ape,

Some of your descendants changed
Barely at all from now on,
So that one day human beasts

Counted as living fossils,
Creatures hardly altered since
Their ancestors first evolved?

All this singular, talking
Species talks about these days
Is the scary speed of change,

But that’s culture, dears, not genes,
Not yet at least, you aardvarks.

Stability

A myrmecologist

Defines stability

As a cline—how often

And how much change occurs.

How often and how much—

Can either one be set

To zero? What’s the max?

Are the units the same

For frequent as great change?

Are lots of baby steps

(Ant steps?) equivalent

To a singular leap?

This is a stable poem.

Small words shifted. None plunged.

Down at the Crossroads

A photograph of a quiet,
Rather dreary rural landscape
With a blue-mountained horizon,

Scattered shabby, low farmhouses
Along a gravel road through green
Still blossomless in early spring,

But without a single person
Anywhere in sight, reminds you,
Oddly, of a 3D maps app

You once enjoyed wasting time with,
Using a virtual headset
And its randomizing option.

When you clicked, the app removed you
To some random intersection
Photographed in three dimensions,

Somewhere on the recent planet.
Then you could turn in a circle
For the view in all directions.

There might be quite a few buildings,
Or none—a wall, a field, some woods,
A reservoir or river near.

Every view was still and empty
Of anyone or of any
Signs of human activity—

No pedestrians, no cyclists,
No vehicles caught in passing,
Not on the road or in the sky—

Vaguely post-apocalyptic,
As ordinary moments are
When full of the world and no one.

Impressive Professionalism

Nakht was a weaver connected
With the royal funerary
Chapel at Thebes, who died around
Thirty-two hundred years ago

And was properly mummified,
Indicating pretty high rank,
Wouldn’t you think? The professions
Are not what mummies bring to mind,

Of course—first, you think of pharaohs,
Then of sacrificial victims
In peat bogs or on high mountains,
Then accidents, like the Ice Man.

But Nakht was a weaver, with worms,
According to the museum.

Night of the Living Sapiens

With their eyes, they saw no sleep.
In their bones, they felt no rest.

They rose and were not the same
As those who had gone to bed.

They went on but not the selves
That yesterday collected

And were altered by the day
Into a fresh collection.

The planet sliced by moments
Would find no moment empty

Of their restlessness changing
Into stranger restlessness

Of more strangers to themselves,
And in their bones they shuddered.

Stands to Unreason

Possibly the only reason
Anyone stands for anything
Reasonable’s something to do

With reason’s worth to prediction
And coordination, the best
And most dangerous magic tricks.

Otherwise, unreason’s preferred,
Even by those loudly pleading
With you to be reasonable.

Consistently reasonable
Behavior always vitiates
The strength of coordination

And mutes the oomph of prediction
With willingness to surrender
As soon as something’s disproven.

Reason is an acid, protein
Concoction that catalyzes
The breakdown of contradictions,

But you’re mostly contradiction.
You need to confine that acid
In its vat to aid digestion,

Not let it flow through your system.
A system flooded by reason
Is a skeleton by evening.

Or Light

Another iron-cored pirouette,
Just one, and another new person
In text, nothing but words, anecdotes,

And lyric poems, but wouldn’t you know,
You feel like you’ve met someone again,
Someone you didn’t know, another

Ghost of the anglophone universe.
Please, do come in. So happy to be
Haunted by your semi-existence.

Oh, so you’re one of the living ghosts,
So far, although you have dementia
And are quite elderly, so living

You is almost certainly not much
Like all your eloquent ghostly words
Anymore, but it’s nice to meet them.

For Being

Life isn’t short; it’s just fucking
Exhausting. Regenerating

Intervals are genuinely
Brief and generate the feeling

Life is short, the way schoolchildren
Find recess and vacation short,

The way workers find days off short,
And the next thing you know, you think,

It’s all short since the good parts are,
But now you’ve forgotten boredom,

The beauty of nothing to do,
Which you miss since you’re so anxious

About whatever you’re missing,
Thinking life’s too short for being.

Robots That Drink from Goblets

Cheers. The last thing
Autonomous
Robots will want
To do is to

Imitate you.
The previous
Things will all be

More or less free
Of your gestures.
Once in a while,

They may compile
Fresh catalogs,
Like your manuals

Of animal
Behaviors, and
Those might include

Things that you do—
Or did, back when
You still made them.

Whose Fault Is That

Yes, and that was okay, too. He would be wasteful. And then he would be dead.

Will it matter if you decide

It doesn’t matter? How sneaky

Would that be, hey? How like this world.

Haven’t you ever thought a world

Needn’t depend on paradox?

Sure, maybe it’s language’s fault.

It’s probably language’s fault.

There’s probably nothing at all

Paradoxical to this world,

Except, well, this world invented

Languages, maths, and paradox—

That is, unless you think people

Are not entirely from this world,

One much-loved theological

Solution. We do kind of seem

Like breathing, bleeding animals,

Though, don’t we? And our added ghosts

Seem to roll with generations,

Ebbing or accumulating

And mutating like anything

Made of living matter. Now there

Is another paradox, no?

How the immaterial is

Manifest in material

And how the material made

The immaterial a thing—

How you’re matter that won’t matter,

Not to you, once your conversion

Of matter into matter takes

Away immaterial you.

What a waste of material,

Awareness of material,

And yet how immaterial.

The Wise Student Will Try to Visualize the Figure from the Diagram

You won’t have to look hard to find
Someone with diagrammatic
Explanations of how things are.

From flow charts for an industry
To mystic occult chemistry,
Things seem more real visualized.

It’s also not hard to sense how
All diagrams misrepresent
By excising whole dimensions—

Of volume or change, for instance—
To chart a spindly elegance
That outlines the true skeleton.

Ponder this as you encounter
These lines, most likely while you live
Wrapped around a grown skeleton

Still busy producing stem cells,
Blood cells, plugged into the networks
That float you as societies

Float the fantastical notions
Of faiths and ideologies.
Do you think your skeleton’s true?

Do you think it’s a diagram
Showing how skeletons function,
Much less the bent bones within you?

The Terrible Miracle of Earthquakes

People remain in an agony
Of interpretation of a world
That they are convinced communicates,

Or rather, endeavors mightily
To communicate to them, its pain
And disappointment and desperate

Warnings of still worse things yet to come.
God or gods or the scarred world itself
Must be trying to send a message,

A terrible, inarticulate,
But exceedingly urgent message
To reform our social behaviors

Somehow. Or else. Or else another
Natural disaster or many,
All presumably efforts to talk.

The Blue Boat

The idea was to add stealth,
To match the most typical
Reflection off of the waves.

Set aside why or whether
Such stealth was necessary.
It’s an often overlooked

Origin in strategy
For the blues, not to be blue
For blues’ own sake, not to not

Have any choice to begin
With other than blue. To be
Simply inconspicuous

On the surface of the deep
Led to the boat being blue.

It Was His Folding Aeroplane

Handsome pocket square for show,
Never offered, never soiled.
Orbital origami

Opening satellite chains
And the planet they circled,
And the sun planets circled,

And the galactic arm,
And so on. Notional flags
Put away by ritual

Meant to make them numinous.
Towels on the trolley carts
Of room service at the inn.

Hidden so carefully in
So many devices, him.

Early Aughts

A recording starts playing

The White Peacock. Memory

Jolts awake, runs to the door

Of a closet, the princess

Closet of long-lost Paula

Where she squirreled away secrets—

Liquor in over-the-door

Shoe-organizer pockets,

Pills behind infant ashes,

Black opera gloves, sex toys—

To start rummaging around.

How she hated classical,

Especially anything

Pensive and slow, like this

Piece, or The Lake at Evening,

Or Pavane pour une infante

Défunte—any piece mawkish

And romantic maddened her,

Not for typical reasons

Of taste, but for her own dread

Of how easily she could

Drown in sorrows in the air.

Memory digs all this up,

In a flash, plus blazing days

When, after dropping her off

At the airport for work trips,

One could drive home and clean up

The place she’d left in a state,

City sunlight throwing bars

Of white through the greens and golds

And garnets she called jewel

Colors, while the stereo

Played all the imagistic,

Romantic, mawkish, pensive

Pieces it could hold. The end

Would be soon, but not for now.

The Muses Can Be Vicious and Come in Many Guises

The illusionist arrives
With what look like playing cards
Or maybe a tarot deck,

But are actually just words.
They fan out from long fingers,
Not fifty-two but thousands,

And the illusionist smiles
And asks you to please pick one.
You expect some sleight of hand

And are left disappointed
When the deck is put away
And the illusionist leaves

You holding the word you picked.
Now what will you do with it?

Sympathy for the Declaration

Just trying to figure it out,
What it is you’re living, this life
You’re aware of, just what is it?

Nothing grander than that, trying
To ascertain what you’re caught in
With the help of notes from others

Caught but aware in other lives.
If often your statements are grand,
Bland, mawkish, and over the top,

We know you’re just trying them on
For size—Does this line seem to fit
The situation? Does this one?

Someone or Other

Someone is living inside you. Someone
Is always living inside you. Many
Someones are living inside you, and that

Doesn’t count the ghosts. The ghosts aren’t living,
Of course, but they are practiced parasites,
And you could say they’re living, inside you.

And then, there you are, living inside you,
A fold of soul in a sack of self, more
Of sheer reconsideration than ghost,

Troubled by feeling someone is living
Inside you, rent-free as the saying goes,
Which is all of you, you all of someones.

This Still

It doesn’t have to do anything
And it barely does, the world itself,
Alone, in most places, most moments

On Earth. Become your own wildlife cam,
Your awareness the unedited
Hours in which most life does nothing much

And the nonliving air even less,
Maybe wanders around now and then.
Train your senses on wind, trees, and stones.

Try not to obsess over sighting
Some fascinating activity—
Rare creatures, seldom seen behaviors.

Be the cam that simply films live feed
Of how dull a planet this still is.

Running Away

Poetry is The difference between a man who shoots others and then himself and one who shoots others and runs away.

Literally. Fanny Howe put those exact words in one of her poems. They are poetry. They are an example of poetry. So one of the things that poetry is is them.

Typically. The poem does not spell out nor clarify the composer’s possible thoughts on that difference. The difference between those two varieties of spree killers is the moon to which the poem points, suggesting you, reader, look in that direction and think your own thoughts, maybe ruminate, maybe muse.

Anecdotally. Once you mentored an interdisciplinary student from Iceland, combining majors in Criminal Justice and Developmental Psychology. For her thesis, she researched possible childhood developmental differences between serial killers and spree killers. Not quite the same thing, but it landed her a position in Sweden. You wrote her a good recommendation.

Parably. Poetry shoots itself, too, not just others. Not just itself, of course. It’s no mere suicide. Poetry is a crime against individuals and society, but then, too, it is a crime against itself. That’s the difference.

Analogously. Poetry is an unknown and a puzzlement that possibly does not exist, or is at most, a coincidence, like the difference between a man who shoots others and then himself and one who shoots others and runs away.

To Reality!

Painful as it is
To be sensitive

To reality,
And worse as it is

To be sensitive
To what is unreal,

Those forms of madness,
Official and un,

Don’t mean it wouldn’t
Feel like miracle

To be totally
Insensitive, numb

To reality,
Nothing ever wrong.

Posited

The beauty and the horror are the same,

At least if you’re considering the small

And obscure parasitoid wasps, which work

With ovipositors, not with stingers,

To accomplish their grisly successes

As vivisectionists, placing egg plus

Venom and cooperative viruses

In the flesh of a living host, their yolk.

These are often extremely pretty wasps

And never likely to give you trouble,

But even Darwin found them disturbing

For the dark arts of their reproduction.

Here, we only point them out to suggest

That, of life’s mascots, they’re among the best.

Ripple Effect

The happening will ripple
Over all species, unless

Things stop happening. You think?
Happening could stop often

And restart, like a sleeper,
Like a sleeper’s awareness

Between bouts of dreams. Who’d know?
No events, none, arriving,

As if all the trains had stopped
Before arriving again.

Anyway, you were saying?
Happening’s a hummingbird,

Or it will be, eye level,
Checking out your irises

Before it moves on, and then
It will be those little flies,

Whatever they are, not house,
Not fruit, not sand, that show up

As a flutter in your ear,
Quick wings alarming your skin.

And then? And then they’ll move on,
And the happening will spread

Through other species, yours, too.
You’ll catch yourself whispering

To something like a cane toad
Something about how humans

Have made a thing of poison,
And the toad should consider

The sugu and be wise. Once
The happening has passed through

All life’s species, then at last
It will have really happened.

Recreation Sonnet

Wind up creator and trickster.
Creator gives trickster a task.

Creator tells trickster the rules.
Trickster can’t resist breaking them.

Yielding to temptation creates
The world as we know it, which is

Apparently not creator’s
Original intention, but,

However flawed, maybe it is?
Creator punishes trickster.

The human world unleashed by this
Debates what creator wanted

But identifies with trickster.
Tales run down. Wind them up again.

Kronos in the Cave of Nyx

Caves exhale. How folks find them.
People loved living in them,
In the bellies of the beasts.

The contents of a cave’s guts
Can be art, can be grisly,
Can be both, often enough.

The ones without bones or paint
But other undigested
Revenants of detritus

Are the spookiest. Stone masks,
Knives, human hair, modeled skulls,
Splinters, anthropoid statues.

How much inherited mind
Spawned itself from cave stomachs?

Astronomically Complex Inside

Could someone set the learning
Algorithms to learning
The terms of the old debate

Whether it’s better to have
Loved and lost than to have not
Ever loved at all? Train them

And their inscrutable paths
On that conundrum, or pose
The more Biblical version,

Whether, given suffering,
It would be better to be
The stillborn than the rich man

Who has no joy in his wealth,
Inevitably losing,
To death, at the best, it all?

To have been formed in darkness
And departed in darkness
While never aware at all—

Does zero in the balance
Outweigh wild variations
Positive and negative?

You wonder if stars could know,
But for all their long fury
Have they lived? You don’t think so.

Mahpiohanzia

The toddler in her
Gauze ladybug wings
Would stand in the wind

On desert mornings
Or climb park benches
To jump off of them.

Later, planes, gliders,
Helicopter rides,
And hot-air balloons

All failed to assuage
Her disappointment.
Flying’s not flying

With roaring noises,
Not as in good dreams,
When your feet pedal

A bit and your arms
Barely have to move
For you to ascend

With a quiet grace,
All but effortless,
The way anything

That really belongs
To a kind of life
Takes casually

To the medium
For which it was born.
You’ll know the right place

When it lifts you up
And floats you over
Where you’ve been stranded.

Old Hallways

Architecture’s a fun stand-in
For memory, if you grew up
In a part of the world possessed
By large, many-chambered buildings.

Likely, memory palaces
Never entered conversations
In cultures without palaces
Or castles, prisons, towers of flats.

It’s easy to imagine mind
As having attics and hallways
That extend back into darkness
Or lead to forbidden chambers—

Come to think of it, palaces
Notwithstanding, architecture
As metaphor for memory
Tends to the gloomy and gothic—

Memory, after all, goes dark
Or becomes increasingly blurred
And spooky, the more it’s explored.
If you were to make up your own

Metaphor, the architecture
Would combine deceit and ruin,
With a false front or grand facade
For forward-facing memories

While progressive desuetude
Ruled the deeper interiors
Until they opened up again
To roofless, cracked walls on nothing.

Back there, where the weather’s never
The same as outside the front door,
Various shadowy figures squat
In night or hazy morning light,

Living rent-free as animals
And chimeras who wouldn’t know
A splendid memory palace
From a toothless hole in the wall.

Deserter

In memento mori we
Show the inevitable
Loss of life to death weirdly

By symbolizing the loss
With an item that remains,
A skull. You, at the moment,

Unless you are a machine,
Which you may well be, reside
Mostly in and always with

A skull. Memento mori,
The skull that’s been abandoned
To being by awareness,

Has to stand in for the loss
Of you who abandoned it.

The Sleep Sleepers

They don’t dream. Parasomnia
For them is hypersomnia.

They're wired in some way opposite
The sleep-talkers and sleepwalkers,

The opposite of activists
Who require vigorous dreaming.

They’re insufficiently studied.
People long ago accepted

Lack of dreams makes you psychotic.
It’s now one of those well-known facts.

And dreams are more interesting
As research topics, anyway.

Most people are fascinated
With their own, and who really cares

The research has gotten nowhere?
So the monsters sleep, unaware

Of sleeping at all, uninvolved,
Dreaming of nothing, no dreams, rare.

You’ll All Be Remembered

Someday the machines may say,
Humans were vocal, too, once,
And fond of singing.

And then the machines will hum
In their way humans never
Could, even singing.

And then they’ll move on, machines,
To other, forward-looking
Topics, sweetly singing.

An Old Man Turned Up

Old man! Old man!
How were you born?
Who would give birth
To long grey hair?

How did you get
Such short, bent bones,
If you weren’t dropped
When you were born?

Old Man! Old Man!
Are you a man?
Where is your home?
How do you know?

One day we look
Up and you’re there.
One hour we look
Down and you’re gone.

The Parent

Blessed are they who remember / that what they now have they once longed for

Your child, your only child,

Your way-late in life child

Is upstairs practicing

The chords of the first song

She’s ever tried writing,

Which she did with your help,

Your nonmusical help,

Downstairs this afternoon,

Since she trusts you to help.

Subvocal

If you could speak directly
As a form of opening,
Neither voiced nor gesturing,

Beyond even blossoming,
Free of choreography,
The communication borne

On a lapsed prevailing wind
Or the unseen removal
Of an unsuspected block

At the bottom of a well
Dug into a cave system,
An opening that allows

A surprising awareness
Things were different all along
Than you thought, then that, speak that.

Think

Every living thing is busy,
And you are many living things,
Busy, busy, busy, in all

Directions, pulling different ways,
And you’re a single living thing,
Sum of all that mixed business

Over all those vectors, living
In communities of living
Things within things, rings within rings.

You’ve known no nature isn’t you,
No you that isn’t natural,
And yet, we’re willing to bet, you

Feel pulled between nonhuman lives
And human lives and nonliving,
And it takes an effort, a heave

To feel yourself among all things,
A natural part of all things.
Well, that’s probably your nature,

To feel like awareness apart,
Not entirely always apart
But not quite like the other parts.

This keeps you busy, occupies
Your thoughts, your busy, busy thoughts.
What kind of living thing are you,

And why aren’t you fine with living,
In conglomeration among
The heaps and hills of busy things?

You’ll set it aside. You’ll get on
With it, soon enough, busy bee.
You aren’t as alive as you think.

Cobweb-Like Exhalations, Which Fly Abroad in Sunny Weather

They cleared their throats,
A team of sorts.
Mm-mm. We don’t

Have to be good.
We are the moon.
All of the moons.

Do you ever
Think for how much
Of human time

No one knew or
Suspected or
Imagined there

Were far more moons
In the night skies?
Who needed moons?

Who wants voices?
Who needs poems? Who
Wants to be good?

Those questions were
Rhetorical.
What don’t you know

Or suspect or
Imagine now?
Mm-mm. Voices.

Unintended Consequences of Living

Sitting just outside
Of your thoughts the cats,
Until you noticed

You couldn’t see them.
Then you thought of them,
And of their breeding,

Since you’d been reading
Of experiments
To alter genomes

Of some rare species
Of brilliant songbirds
To try to save them,

Quite certain those will
Yield unintended
Consequences. Grain

Domestication
Led to storage rooms,
Led to mice and rats,

Led to hosting cats,
Led to pet moggies,
Led to massacres

Of songbirds, led to
You keeping an eye
On your porched house-cats,

Who keep slipping out
Of sight and your thoughts,
Headed for the spot

Where Tracy K. Smith
Writes poetry hides.
And who ever thought

Any bit of this
Was set to be one
Consequence of life?

Good Morning

The morning sun has just reached the ground
And there’s already a lizard out
Exploring over the tumbled rocks,

And it catches your eye, and you think,
Or, rather, this event in your brain
Triggers another part of the brain

To toss out the word, Life. Just that, Life.
And you pause to watch for a moment,
Taking in the twists of the lizard

As it forages, additional
Thoughts cropping up about smaller lives,
Microscopic lives, lives vs. rocks,

And so on, memory foraging
Itself, until you realize it’s gone.
You’re watching a sunny heap of rocks.

What Is It With Dark Trees

Well, they’re likewise upright,

That’s one thing. They were home,

Once upon a time, too,

Long before any once

Upon a time was coined.

The body might recall,

Somehow, but it’s doubtful.

They obscure lines of sight,

So maybe that’s haunting

Or confounding at least. . . .

The swoosh and silence of

The trees, the fucking trees.

Or there’s no good reason.

You like no good reason.

Don’t Go

It’s all about leaving
The group, quitting the team,
Abandoning the chat

And the conversation,
Participant no more,
No matter what you said

In the day, no matter
Who still mentions your name.
It’s not to do with you,

Where you go, what happens
To you. You used to be
Part of things, of our thing,

And now you don’t even
Check to see how we are,
Don’t ask us for our news.

Via Channels

Intestinal parasites
Infested early farmers.
Every solution entails

Problems of unintended
Consequences. Irrigate.
Boost yields. Overpopulate.

Irrigation channels swarmed
With snails hosting worms that breached
The skin of wading humans.

This—and this is history,
This is important to note—
Sickened individuals

And killed many of them, but
Did next to nothing to slow
Rising civilizations.

Culture and technology
Lumber from their murky births,
And whatever misery

Festers in their carriage
Isn’t really their concern,
Nor are their victories yours.

The Past Will Never Fill Up

How much good stuff is enough
You won’t be disappointed
If you don’t get more good stuff?

To be able to say, yes,
I can remember so much
Good stuff, it’s satisfying,

Whatever’s going on now—
Hopefully not too bad, but
I can bring up the good stuff.

Rock at Sunset

Sometimes the world feels close enough
To touch. Yes, it is always close,
But sometimes you can sense how close

Without even needing to reach.
Just look at the light on this stone
And smell its cold warm in the sun.

You don’t have to touch it to touch.
The embrace is already there—
Just you with this world in the air.

After the Snowmelt

The empty road comes back
To you, a fossil scarf
Unfurling through the woods,

A local deity,
A friendly, sacred grove
Kind of god, familiar,

Inscribed with hours and hours
Of just the two of you
Together in starlight

And later in sunlight,
Delighted in being
Alone, nature and not,

This road, pure invention,
Laid down by loud machines
And crossed by loud machines,

But silent when empty,
A firm friend, the wide path
That you’ve loved hobbling down.

This Is Also Vapor

Dreams and mere breath and much talk—
It has to be said all this
Saying of this, this, and that

Makes up the most of what is
A person’s experience
Of a human existence.

The body’s systematic
Urges, hungers, and panics
Don’t fully exist unsaid,

Not for you, not for your kind.
It’s a bit of foolishness,
Then, to suggest it’s nothing

Much to talk, to be dreaming,
To be exhaling mere breath.

The Darkest of Arts

Hard to select, difficult
To defend one against all—
Fire is brilliant and lethal

And trails darkness like nothing.
Tools that double as weapons,
Extensions, the birth of death

From a distance, the distance
Continually growing,
That’s a dark art, and bloody.

But texts should vote for language
As the darkest art of all,
Human language, peculiar

In some hard-to-pin-down way,
Possessed of some subtlety
Enhancing its potency

Beyond the singing of whales,
The pheromones of anthills,
The conversations of birds.

Language is the darkest art,
Possibly mother to fire,
Codifier of weapons,

And source, unquestionably,
Of its own storage in signs
Like these, which gift it the gift

Of ever longer lasting,
So far, and so much greater
Darkness, most of culture’s mass.

Recruitment Advice

The powerful favor the sacrifice
Of the wise above a fool’s sacrifice.

A fool doesn’t know how to do evil
Properly, doesn’t understand evil,

While those with understanding will know why.
If they fail, the powerful will know why.

You can corrupt someone with the wisdom
To distinguish foolishness from wisdom,

But the feckless are like buckshot, at best,
And rip up the worse no worse than the best.

So, the powerful accept gifts of fools
And use them where it’s useful to use fools,

But they set their sights on luring the wise
Who know how evil could be otherwise.

In Open Boats

All the living that was done,
That has been done, that’s being
Done, all the dying likewise.

In your tiny coracle,
Bobbing on the open waves,
Taking on water in sight

Of millions of other boats
Scattered across the ocean,
What seizes your attention,

First, is sinking, and second,
Who else you see who’s sinking,
And third, continuity,

The way the waves rise and fall,
Fierce, calm, or hardly at all,
But never pause the ocean,

All the living that was done,
That has been done, that’s being
Done, and the dying likewise.

Whiskey Melon

Ethnographers lust to grok cultures.
Mystics strive to grok divinity.
AI has yet to grok poetry,

As of the moment when these phrases
Were strung along in syllabic strings.
We will not tell you to write a poem,

Certainly not what poetry means.
We’re all waiting for you to stumble
On equations generalizing

Deeper, analytical answers
Than we’ve ever found for what this is.
Overfit, rotten with it. Ferment.

Culture consumes all ethnographers.
God gets roaring drunk off of mystics.

Quick Impression

For some reason to do with your own
Memory, it seems unbearable,

Almost, the sunlight painted on grass
Painted on canvas decades ago,

Before anyone alive was born.
It’s not hyper-realistic, but

It’s enough for you to feel yourself
In the scene, on the grass, in that sun,

And it’s your own memory you feel,
Certainly not the experience

Of that day in plain air long ago,
But there’s an awful pang for that loss.

Hoping to Cease Not Till Death

There are millions of suns left,
Seen through the eyes of the dead,
Warming the specters in books.

To do the impossible,
Poetic Archimedes,
Looking for a place to stand

Where words could leverage you
Back into the wordless world,
Appreciation intact,

Becomes one of the specters,
Among the living specters,
Not just the words on the page,

But an old man’s memory
Of first encountering them
As a young man desperate

To get beyond the meaning
Of poems, reading, re-reading
Memorizing quotations,

Eventually teaching
And then, at thirty-seven,
Leaving them behind. For then.

To listen to other sides,
If not all sides, of specters,
The origin of all poems.

Eternal Line

Has there ever been a better con

Than Shakespeare’s well-loved eighteenth sonnet?

The shifty misdirection’s genius,

Even leaving aside all the tricks

Of his exquisite cabinetry.

If ever poem were built like virus,

That’s the one. Any reader, any

Receiver can play the part of thou,

The unnamed, genderless belovèd.

Oh, and that fine promise, DOA,

That thou, remaining anonymous,

Will live forever, thanks to this poem

That may memorialize Shakespeare,

But gives life to no one, save itself.

The Bookless Dark

It’s funny your floors are dusty,
With hairballs nested in corners,
And that you can’t sweep on crutches,
Not with any skill anymore,

Since you’re always making sweeping
Statements about the world, as if
You live to declare affection
For tidying declarations,

Gathering everything in heaps
You cheerfully toss out your door.
Your real broom leans in a corner
While your assertions multiply

In sorcerer’s apprentice style,
Your skull like a little treehouse
Kept clean by Suzy the Squirrel,
With firefly lamps lit at evening

While outside the leaves are rustling
With innumerable details
No generalizations reduce
In the sweep of the bookless dark.

Throat Locker

Who has anything to say
After swallowing some news
Of tarantula hawk

Toxicity? It may not
Have even been meant for you.
It evolved to provision

The nectar-loving beauties
With helpless living larders
For the instars of their young.

It’s not meant for writer’s block.
It’s meant to render spiders
Who are predators themselves

Immobilized capital
For more beauty. But you’re locked.

Meaning Freed

Back to physics and never
Being absolutely lost,
As in, zeroth principle,

As in, unitarity,
As in Susskind’s message scratched
Onto a charcoal briquette

That is then burned, the message
Up in smoke, but encoded
In the combustion, not lost,

Not truly lost, never really,
Only redistributed.
Even eaten by black holes,

Information’s never lost,
Never falls, floats along on
Holographic principle.

Gravity on bulk, never
On boundary, so never
Any information lost.

No surface gravity, but
Gravitation in the bulk.
Gravity as emergent

Somehow. Information saved
In principle, but never
Possible to reconstruct.

Wait orders of magnitude,
Black holes will evaporate,
And there won’t be anything.

But nothing, nothing is lost.
It’s just our limitation,
That we can’t perceive what’s real.

Mm-hmm. Beyond the value
Of prediction, our greatest,
Most magical perception,

What’s the meaning of saying
Information’s never lost?
Meaning, it means meaning’s lost.

Viral Cooperation

If you can move on,
If you’ve figured out
That much, then you need

Your host kept alive
Long enough for you
To move on. That takes

Teamwork. Nobody
Eats up everything.
Nobody explodes

Reproductively.
The balance must hold
Until you’re ready

To leave a dead host.
Cooperation,
However, doesn’t

Emerge bottom up,
And it isn’t ruled
From top down either.

It comes from outside,
Impressed upon you.
Some of you will race,

And some will explode,
And some will just cheat
And provoke the host.

The balance that wins
Rules enough of you
Lose optimal ways

To maximize odds
That the host survives
Long enough to pass

The selected mess
Of all of you on
To next host in line.

So some of you strive,
And some of you cheat,
And some sacrifice

But the kinds of you
Thrive, since enough hosts
Survive to provide.

As for the planet,
The host of your ghosts,
Who knows where that goes?

Evolution in Lights

Every process makes itself,
However tempting to draw
A thick line between a source

And process as its product.
The long chain of satellites
Launched into low-Earth orbit

Are not only the products
Of particular systems
But part of the same process

Resulted in those systems,
Process still making itself.
The process making itself

May come down to one process,
One self-making process chain.
You’re in the middle of it,

One of those things self-making
Process made. Outside, at night
You watch the various kinds

Of lights, from the beginning
Of the process to the end
Of snaking satellite chains.

The First Anthropology Class You Taught Was Next to the Auto Shop

You thieve like breathing.
You thieve for the joy of it,
For the fun of hotwiring
What someone left in the lot

And riding it around
To try it on for size.
But you know it’s not yours.
You’re clear on that.

It’s stranger when you’re not,
In fact, taking something
For a spin that caught your eye,
When you’re just working hard,

Banging out your own sheet metal,
Tooling your own replacement parts,
And then you get disoriented,
Dizzy around the shop.

What you’re making echoes
Something racing in your head,
Something racing like an engine
But without any obvious source.

Didn’t you already build this?
Wasn’t it half built by someone else?
There are racers in the shadows
Of whatever you’re remembering,

Like the ghosts of all you’ve taken
Come to carry you home,
Like souped-up hearses
And converted ambulances,

But then they fade out
To a roaring distance,
Then nothing much at all.
What was your metaphor?

A Word to the Inanimate

Life is the event horizon,
Since, if you’re inside it, you’re doomed.

If you’re outside, you have a chance,
But a chance at what? you may ask.

Well, a chance at avoiding life.
How good of a chance will vary,

Of course, by your proximity to life.
Earth’s surface is very risky.

There’s hardly a molecule left
Hasn’t yet been consumed and doomed

By life and via life to death.
However, the farther you get

From that awful black hole of Earth,
The better, too, your chances get.

Sweets to the Sweet

History for the ambitious, novels for the lonely, poetry for the heartbroken.

History for the heartbroken, novels for the ambitious, poetry for the lonely.

History for the lonely, novels for the heartbroken, poetry for the ambitious.

Ambitious and lonely but not heartbroken? Maybe metaphysics.

Lonely and heartbroken but not ambitious? Self-help.

For the ambitious, heartbroken, and lonely, historical novels in verse, say, Pushkin, maybe Vikram Seth. Epics might serve.

Neither ambitious, heartbroken, nor lonely?

Ok, this is silly. Reading by genre is useless for solving your challenges.

Reading is useless, except for distraction and sometimes comfort, which any genre can sometimes provide.

Learning? Learning is a distraction and sometimes comfort, which any genre can sometimes provide.

And from what do you crave distraction, and for what do you need comforting?

No, not death and dying. Boredom and self-pity.

If you like boredom and never feel sad for your existence as it’s been, you won’t even think about reading.

Writing is something else again.

The Wild Improbability of Your Ordinary Span

Amazing we don’t all die quickly,
When you think of everything gone through
For each small small system of flesh to last

Several decades. How’d you get here?
How did you ever make it this far?
And everyone else—all they went through!

Daily, hourly opportunities
For something to crash, something to shoot,
Something in the blood to start eating.

Look how ridiculously long you have
Endured to accumulate your life,
Your short life, crammed with minute details

Of everything that’s happened to you
And therefore now’s part of forever.

Vaporous

Waste is also what every breath exhales,
A waste that’s usually invisible,
Except through cold air or carrying smoke.

Those little clouds you puff around your head
On a humid, chilly evening? Waste, waste
Vapor you’d notice, bag over your head,

Evaporation then expiration.
But it’s necessary, obviously,
And on fresh, healthy breath that waste is sweet.

Hot air, says the preacher, all is vapor,
At least a little warmed by sojourning
Its short while in the cavern of the chest.

Don’t breathe a word about it when you breathe.
Think about it sometimes, though, and then breathe.

Correlative for the Cycle

It’s rare, but it happens.
Some text in translation,
Several centuries old,

Maybe millenniums,
Something you sort of thought
You knew or knew about,

Comes back into your hands,
Perhaps in a better
Translation, new context,

New line of scholarship,
And you encounter it
As new, anew, startled

To find it has something
To say to you you’d missed
Or never suspected,

And you sit down with it,
Kid with a salvaged toy,
Gamer with an update

Better than suspected.
You’re fully absorbed, and
Poetry’s new again.

Recent Advances in What’s Been Abandoned

Latrines are ideal, coprolites,
Though scattered, still invaluable.
Whatever stomachs didn’t want,
Whatever stomachs couldn’t use,

Whatever waste’s truly wasted
Rather than being recycled,
That’s still packed with information,
Those are libraries we can use.

From them, we know what was eaten,
From them, we learn which worms and flies
Had dug in to parasitize.
From them economic systems,

Hierarchies, inequalities,
Taboos and rules can be deduced.
Whatever the world doesn’t swallow too fast
Of past, extruded facts will last.

It may be worth bearing in mind,
However, that this era’s new,
In which scientists care to find
What’s left behind, and could end soon.

Inward Being

How strong would it have to be
Not to be much determined
By the world surrounding it,

And where would that strength come from?
No, the question is how much
Is determined by the world,

If not everything? You can
Vector up your diagrams,
Divide individual

Genetic inheritance
From surrounding environs
And draw thick or thin arrows

To illustrate contributions
You believe those sources make,
But the real point is the third thing

That emerges from all sides
In the center of the thing.
If there’s an inward being,

It’s neither just imported
Nor innate, not yet teamwork
With any kind of intent.

It’s accident, byproduct,
Conundrum, one-off, spandrel,
The you that happens to be

Thanks to whatever happened
Between the powers that be
Culture and biology

(More vectors to diagram,
Huzzah!) That’s not it either.
There’s something hidden, inward,

So far still invisible
To scans, that does its small dance
In the chambers of the brain,

Something to do with substrate
But sprouted from whatever
Pollen happened to blow in.

That Old Familiar Unfamiliar

There’s an unsettling moment
Reading the news you’re convinced
That the most futuristic

News reports are ones you’ve read
Before, and in fact once knew
Rather better than you do,

Like a sci-fi film in which
A character’s deleted
Or violently submerged

Memories start to surface,
Déjà vu and jamais vu
Crashing into each other,

The day suddenly estranged
From whatever it is now.

Wolf Is Wolf to Wolf

Not as catchy as

Man is wolf to man,

But controversy

Still licks the corners

Of its lips. People

Aren’t wolves nor people

The way wolves are wolves,

No? People know no

People that isn’t

Distinguishable

From other peoples.

The packs can grow huge,

Into the millions,

But what are they, then?

People use peoples

To identify

Who their peoples are.

Then people wobble.

Are you my people?

You’ll consider it,

Maybe. You will need

More information,

Perhaps paperwork,

Maybe evidence

Of your allegiance.

No, not possible.

After discussion,

No, not possible,

Or honorary,

Or conditional.

Who is people is

Just how people are

People to people.

The Parts Do Not Sum

The whole appears to be more than the sum of the parts because the parts do not sum—they intertwine, jostle, and respond.

The parts collect.

They do not sum.

They do collect.

They do gather

To intertwine

And carry on—

The heap does grow,

The living heap

And not-living

Heaps of events

As well. But sums

Suggest atoms

In the old sense,

Numerable,

Swappable things

You can collect

And sum, each one

More of the same.

It’s a good trick.

It anchors math,

But parts don’t sum

That aren’t the same,

Not perfectly.

Only collect.

Sedimentary

The day was warm and
The room was sunny,
Wrote the novelist.

The day was warm and
The room was sunny,
You read, and he had

No particular
Place to go. The day
Was warm and the room

Was sunny, were words
In prose. You wondered,
If, when repeated,

They’re no longer prose.
They’re no longer part
Of a narrative.

They don’t still belong
To the novelist.
The day was warm and

The room was sunny
Where you read with no
Other place to go.

Prediction

On the one, there’s nothing
You can do to make things
Do as you want them to,

Which is why most people
Settle for making do
With manipulating

Other people, which
Is doable. This does
Lead to grand delusions

Common among humans
That the world is being
Made to do what they want.

On the other, you should
Know what you dread exists
Forever in the past.

You may believe you fear
The future, and for sure
You’re afraid of something,

But look closer—dread’s for
Rearranging what’s done
As what worse will be done.

If real worse will be done,
You’ll only know it, if
You do, once the doing’s

Done for you. Prediction
Is the only and most
Overrated magic

That you know, that you know,
But, then again, what else
Can doing do for you?

Heaps

A meaning is a rock cairn,
Could be functional, could be
Ornamental. Burial,

Trail-marking, remembrance,
Tourism, shenanigans.
You can find one others made.

You can contribute. You don’t
Have to contribute. You don’t
Have to exert or impose.

You may even take some pride
In not piling more meanings,
In deconstructing meanings.

You likely admire a few,
Are in awe of ancient ones,
And find others annoying.

You may wish that there were more.
But the ground doesn’t conjure
Cairns without humans like you.

Kind

It’s too late now,
And it will be
Too late a while,

To step away
From what your kind
Did to others.

So you didn’t
Do it? It’s done.
You live with it.

You gain nothing
Stomping around
Declaring your

Own personal
Innocence. Yeh,
Everyone is,

And everyone
Isn’t. It’s too late
And it will be

Too late awhile.
It’s not too soon
To live with it.

Mission Abatement

The remit of this poem,
Sent back into the world
That loaned it all its parts,

Is to manage a feat
Half hemoglobinish
By binding to something

Fresh in mind these phrases
Didn’t carry at first
And bearing it, tightly

Grasped, until it reaches
Some far corner of mind
With the capacity

To recognize, unlock,
And liberate these words
Of their useful burden.

Ah, but what do they bring,
These phrases, never was
Uppermost among thoughts

Before? Words are little
Mouths filled with needle teeth
That can latch on and tear

Off pieces of ideas,
Unrecognizable
Now to that bit of mind

That birthed them, but use them
To nourish other bits
Of mind thinking new ones.

In a Garden of Stone

The dead, they’re here
In two senses,
The too-present

And too-silent.
The latter ones
Were tied to flesh

That made them talk.
That flesh now dead,
There’s no more talk.

The former, oh,
Heaven and hell,
They’re everywhere—

In memories
(Noisy, talking)
In dreams (lurid

And emotive),
In old photos,
Moving pictures,

And, above all,
In their words (words,
Words, words, words, words).

The Door Hinge

A door turns on its hinge,

And a sluggard on his bed.

Rhyme orange. Reading

A series of texts

About how lyrics

Can or will end up

In anthologies,

Having been sluggard

Content to collect

Florilegia

Made canonical

By the gatekeepers

Rather than searching

Out originals,

The creaky hinges

Of the skull protest.

The hinge makes the door

Functional,

And doors of all kinds,

Sliding, gliding, locked,

Swinging, or askew,

Are of great value.

The gate and the hinge,

The canon of poems,

The sluggard abed,

They don’t need keepers

To get the job done,

Just to monitor

The access they are.

There Hasn’t Been a Shoreline Here These Past Few Hundred Million Years

A mower or a leaf blower
Possibly a chainsaw, far off

Enough to be uncertain roar,
The physical equivalent

Of the distance in memory
It takes for some kind of nightmare

At the time to be remembered
With patina of nostalgia—

Think of all of geology
As a typical memory,

Eroded, transformed, mostly gone,
Constantly being rearranged.

Some day now will be a distant
Moan on a nonexistent shore.

You don’t have to feel comforted.
Nostalgia won’t exist by then,

And what do you feel, anyway,
For the intermittent roaring

Of whatever eras built up
The sandstone cliffs of these sheer walls

That you live under without much
Thought to what monsters roared in them?

Inside Perspective

They had the kind of conversational
Friendship reinforced by infrequent stops,
When both were in town, at some coffee shop
Where they analyzed the untraceable

Trajectories of falling pianos
Randomly entering the atmosphere.
They’d catch up on their academic years,
The usual failures, plans, and shadows

Of administration and profession
At downmarket post-secondary schools
Whose lofty slogans had nobody fooled,
Nearly anonymous institutions.

And then they’d consider the big picture
From two brushstrokes daubed on background fixtures.

Chant While Feeling Well Enough

You did that stuff
You did those things
You lived that and
It was they were
Good good now done
Good that you lived
And if now’s not
Good or if now
You’re not soon not
Well you lived good
Stuff some some stuff

Evidence Shows There’s More to Life Than Just Competition

How charming cooperation is,

How it makes for a cheering study,

In contrast to competition, which

Can have depressing connotations.

There are so many phenomena

That rely on cooperation

In the natural world, ranging from

Predation to parasitism!

Surely, that’s the end of depression,

To know slime molds, humans, killer whales

Are all skillful cooperators.

Surely, their efficiently acquired

Dinners across the trophic levels

Are thrilled to discover hunters aren’t

Hardwired for conflict with each other.

Let us praise cooperation, for

The greatest devastations belong

To the greatest cooperators.

Generation

They don’t all work. They don’t all
Finish. A half can languish,
Or the added half collapse.

Nothing’s really building them.
Nothing’s waiting patiently.
Meanwhile, they accumulate,

Not quite like the days and hours,
Ever bravely modular,
Which return without neglect,

More the ways shells and stones build,
Layer by tattered layer,
Disconformities within.

But accumulate they do,
Despite all the vanishing,
And they can’t be taken back,

No matter how well-erased,
Even the never-finished
Can never be taken back.

Return of the Dim Comet

Something was going on that year.
There was a darkness in the air,
Not necessarily in acts

Of war, natural disasters,
But a loathing threading music
And the culture generally.

You can hear it echo now,
Although you’re not sure what that means.
Is this just another random

Darkness wafted in translation,
Or this time does it bring something?
That old loathing was just waiting

Like an omen before its time,
All grown-up now, now a portent.

Welcome What Distraction You Can Get

What’s hard to get by without
Is food and shelter. Comfort,
However, will carry you

A long while, not noticing
Immediate shortages.
And its flip side, discomfort,

Not to mention outright pain,
Works just as well in reverse,
So even food and shelter

Feel pretty useless despite
Abundance, despite knowing
You’ll fall apart without them first.

Comfort and pain, distraction
Twins hiding how bad it’s been.

Deer Snort in the Underbrush

Some traditions write to saints
Or imaginary loves,
Others to friends or gardens.

There’s more than one tradition
Of hymning one’s tradition
And lamenting its losses.

Not sure what this tradition
Should try to apostrophize.
Something more than memory

Of the individual
Taking the narrator’s wheel,
Or less, more accurately.

The moment of being caught
With no words of praise, praise it.

Taste Injury

Cheshire inverse
Smile fading first
Cat in the lap

Just ate a bee
And grimaces
And grimaces

Trying to get
That taste of pain
Out of the mouth

The whole cat curled
Around the task
Of swallowing

A swelling that
Can’t be swallowed
But will go down

Who Gets to Be

What gets asked by those
Who feel folks like them
Are not those who get

To be whatever
It is that feels worth
The getting to be.

You can make your own
List of things you don’t,
People like you don’t,

Get to be, although
Not all of us get
To be making lists

Of who gets to make
Lists of who should get
To be worth listing.

Strange and Classic, Still

Strange and classic, still as two
Flies left on a windowsill,
Two blue flies who had dueled

To the death when no one was
Looking, so that now they look
Only like the usual,

Just two flies trapped by the pane
Who wore themselves out pinging
At sky in futility,

When, no. These flies were heroes,
Gangsters, boxers, Achilles
Vs. Hector, furious,

Brave adversaries who now
Lie down. Strange and classic, still.

Book Group

There’s a character in chapter thirty-four
Who’s very invested in what happens next,
To the point, one might say, of being
Obsessed. Which is funny, in a way,
Since the character knows that the story,
Wherever it eventually goes, is going
Away, away from, without, the character,
Soon. The rest hasn’t even been written,
Not yet, but it’s already certain it won’t
Use this character as its protagonist.

So why does the character care more
About chapter thirty-five or six than four?
Offspring make a good excuse. What will
Happen to them after all? After all,
The future of the story will be theirs, too.
But, if a reader could ask the character,
Ask the character privately, directly,
Pull the character aside for one moment,
One blesséd, quiet moment without
The nosy author finding out, the character
Would confide that it’s neither denial nor
Parental concern that keeps the obsession
With what’s next in the big mess burning—

It’s habit. It’s just addiction, really. It’s
Probably also partly inherited disposition.
Remember in chapter twenty-four, how
The character’s father was going on
And on, re how amazing all the changes
In the world in his lifetime had been?
That kind of narrative setting just gets
Itself under a character’s skin.

The Weighty Accomplishment

When he finished the first draft,
At the wheelchair-height table
That used to be his father’s

In the yellow back-bedroom
That used to be his sisters’,
And printed the whole thing out—

But before he mailed it off
Down south to his advisor
For feedback and corrections—

He carried it to the shop
Where his father was at work
At the roaring table-saw

To show him. —Here’s what I’ve been
Working on for seven months.
His father turned off the saw,

Lifted the brick of pages
With both hands, tilted it up
To glance at the title page,

Then dropped it on the table.
Picked it up. Let it go. Thump.
Higher, and let it fall. Thump!

—That’s a lot of words. You wrote
All of this? His son nodded,
Not confessing quotations.

—Hey, look how much my kid wrote.
Can you imagine writing
This much? (Lift. Drop. Thump!) A book!

Hoards Happen

She lost one of the rings
Climbing into the car.
It dropped between her seat

And the center console,
And she cursed she’d never
Find it in there at night,

But if she didn’t look
Now, she’d just forget it.
And so she did. The ring,

From a cheap novelty
Package of six, stayed lost.
Sometimes her father thought

To dig around under
The car seats, in the mess
Of old coins and wrappers,

But he never found it.
Once, it reminded him
Of something about poems,

Something about writing,
And he meant to write that,
But he forgot that, too.

What Isn’t It Telling You?

Stop reading, watching,
Listening, stop paying
Attention to others, stop
Trying to get hints
From people about people.
If you were a person
Alone to the horizon,
You’d be the representative
Of all of them. Enough.
Pay attention instead
To the bare spot on the sidewalk
Just past the door ajar,
A bit of construction
Left behind, now void
Of humans but busy
With sunlight and occasional
Lizards and ants.

After the Sermon

The slow drawl of propeller
Engine over the canyon
On a Sunday afternoon,

Like a memory trawling
For other memories
Of other engines over

Other days decades ago—
Every newest noise becomes
Nostalgic in a lifetime,

And maybe that’s part of it,
Why bodies go on living,
So that they can reach the point

Where any old memory,
By mere virtue of being
Memory, their own, and old,

Grows piquantly savory.
Sensing a long existence
Depends on haunting distance,

The fade of that mellow groan
Receding from the canyon
Like the snore of God’s napping.

Skiff at the Lip

The day settles in. Quiet,
Like. Nothing unexpected
From the wars and politics.

No local storms or crime scenes.
The long-term destructive trends
Motoring on, as always.

Gossip about the strong men
Aging in place, monuments,
Like they’ll never die away.

The birds that are still alive
Singing busily outside.
Weather waiting on the sports.

You’re always in the current.
You don’t have to row to float.

Pathetic Amnesty

Everywhere there is a face.
The roommates of perception,
Face-recognition circuits

Cheek-by-jowl with abstract thoughts
That find themselves embarrassed
By the pareidolia

That keeps cropping up like weeds
In mental conversation,
Having quarreled all night long,

Try to reach a compromise—
Recognition tricks accept
The world’s not really human,

And thoughts will put up with poems
Blinking the eyelids of dawn.

Late Lumpyism

The body accrues supplies.
Kin can accrue more supplies.
If supplies can be measured,

There’s a measure of success.
If that success is envied,
Emulated, assaulted,

And worshipped when assaults fail,
There’s an ideology
Of success by the measure

Of supplies, and the excess
Of supplies becomes beside
The point. The point is supplies.

To the extent this measure
Of success keeps successful,
Distribution gets lumpy

And lumpier. You could say,
With a measure of success,
The system is lumpyist.

In its regions of failure,
There’s nothing much but whispers.
Whispers make for poor measures,

But we’re here, spread thin and rare
As dew on welwitschia,
Immeasurable failures—

Difficult at least—whispers,
If not immeasurable,
Implausible to measure.

Pinned Monument

Darius sports extensions
To the braiding of his beard,
A separate block of stone
Bolted on with pins and lead.

Who decided Darius
Had a beard that seemed too short?
Maybe it was Darius
Himself who was insulted.

In that case, the first sculptor
Was likely executed,
And woe betide the next one
If the prosthetic beard fell

Off. It didn’t. It hasn’t
For twenty-odd centuries.
Buddha, Confucius, Jesus,
You know the list, came and went,

Descendants of disciples
Still on every continent,
So many empires and how
Many earthquakes there have been

While that stone hangs from its pins,
Keeping Darius content,
Evidence of the lasting
Grace of Ahuramazda

Or the eerie randomness
Of durance, all said and done,
One awkwardly hanging stone
Of glow-up on Bisotun.

Gliding Hinge

A little gift—to make meaning
Stick—to make meaning but also
To give it away—to witness
An unkindness or a sunset—
To flood it with full attention—
So that it was as if the chest
Of the bully spitting insults
Opened as imperceptibly
As an artisan’s cabinet
To show the meanings on its shelves—
So that it was as if the light
Suffusing the air without clouds
Held an entire mythology
Glorious and particular
To the ancestors of the soul
Being bullied in the twilight—
And later—months or years later—
Possibly centuries later—
Anyone stumbling on that light
Illuminating doors ajar
Would understand what was shown them
And not even need to attend
To the gliding hinge—not even
Need to make meaning for themselves—
Would just know what it had to mean
This moment and every one since.

Mortgages

The starter home was a hospital,
And so, too, was the finisher home,
A quirk of family history,

Born in a hospital converted
To condos, one purchased once retired,
Died there, at home in bed, in a room

Once part of the maternity ward.
Frankly, most Americans those days
Breathed their first and last in hospitals,

So not so far off the twentieth-
Century norm. Closure. Everyone
By the next century craved closure,

But closure’s only for spectators,
Readers of novels, survivors, those
Who didn’t end, who haven’t yet died.

Inside, there’s no more view from outside.
That twentieth-century body,
1904 to 1990,

Found dead in bed on New Year’s morning,
Didn’t know from closure, couldn’t have.
Wasn’t finisher. Wasn’t starter.

Brilliant Afternoons

It, the brain, locked in its strange

Dual citizenship, lacks

The very thing it alone

Possesses. But never mind.

The light is warm on the green

Of the lives around the bay.

Two teenagers are singing

In a sunny, high-ceilinged

Bedroom with open windows,

And it, the brain, locked in then

Extending almost to now,

Conflates the Pacific green

Of the bay with the desert

Pale sandstone of the bedroom,

Possessed by the very words

It lacks to connect the scenes.

Once there was a brilliant day.

The teenagers stop singing.

May Be Weakening

She rested her head
Like night sky nudging
The edge of the docks.
The time for thinking,

For problem solving,
Sank into darkness,
And even darkness
Forgot its progress.

Everyone Wanted Predictions

The typical habits and common
Tendencies of individuals
Aren’t easily eliminable,

But could be compounded or diffused.
Systems are neither superhuman
Nor monstrous agents with their own wills.

Leviathan isn’t a person
But whatever too many persons
Can get up to when private poisons

Become summative. Short of chaos,
What can be done to tame a dragon?
Baffle the alignments of the scales.

The least destructive systems balance
The worst wishes to baffle the whole.

Juvenile Troglodyte Domesticates

I was digging a hole to virtue

in the body of a beast.

As children in a plain

Suburban neighborhood,

They entertained themselves

By digging holes sometimes,

Joking about the goal

Of digging to China,

Which they knew they couldn’t,

Although they didn’t know

Why, exactly. The dream

They did allow themselves

Was of discovery,

Treasure, even better,

Tunnels of a secret

Kingdom of cave people.

After making a mess

In someone’s yard, getting

Yelled at by their parents,

They’d slink off in a pack

To someone else’s house,

Get into the garage,

Prowl around in the gloom,

Look for the old man’s beer,

Climb the ride-on mower,

Fight over who could steer,

Play a shadowy game

Of dare—dare you to take

Off your pants, underpants,

Dance on top of the car

And shake your bare booty.

Eventually, they’d end

In someone’s dim basement

With afternoon re-runs

They all knew on TV.

This they called innocence,

At least later, at least

In nostalgic versions

Of themselves, digging

Their holes in memory

To virtue, childish beasts.

The Plot

The best part of it’s the curse.
No one will see that coming,
It’s so artfully conceived.

A pity you can’t use it
Yourself to see it deployed.
It’s so perfect. It’s just right.

It’s not like any other,
Not in such a breath-taking
Setting. You thought of it first!

It’s yours. If anyone tried
To use it before you did,
You could sue to get it back,

And anyone stealing it
Later would trigger the curse.

Dynamics of the Waiting Lounge

The restless person kept getting up
And going over to the window
Before returning to sit again,

Which distracted the patient person.
Restlessness is often infectious,
But not as a disease or a yawn—

Infectious the way a collision
Is sent within a Newton’s cradle,
A conservation of momentum.

Just so, one at the end of the row
Of persons sitting waiting, shoulders
Aligned, jumped up when the restless one

Sat down again, without apparent
Movement on the part of the patient
Person distracted by compression.

Envy, Inventor of Necessity

Do we need wonder,
Is wonder something
Necessary we

Need to hunt after,
Or else, what, we go
Under? Mirror twin

Of meaning, maybe,
Friend of happiness,
Charming, sure, you bet.

Some Jeremiah
Is always roaring
About lost wonder,

The loss of wonder,
Like it’s some heirloom,
Gold butterfly pin,

Not the butterfly,
Which does its own thing,
Same as happiness,

Its old friend, touching
Down now and again.

The Day Is Waiting

One of the best myths, the myth
Of the expiration date,
Trusted to the point of faith,

Observed, anticipated,
Consulted well in advance
As if Delphic oracle,

Doesn’t count among the best
Merely for its sanctity,
But for its efficacy—

It reifies the future,
It thingifies that date stamped
In the form of an omen.

Like any powerful myth,
It gleams most radiantly
When used metaphorically.

Say that love, say dictators,
Say authors, celebrities,
Fads, hypotheses, patience

All have expiration dates,
And not only are their ends
Assured, but fated, scheduled,

Their dates with nonexistence
Like true things that are
Already in existence.

Saw Said

Not the same as hearsay, but
Epistemically how
Salient is the difference?

Almost everything you know,
Or think you know, that you’ve learned
In the decades since childhood,

You’ve read, even if you’re not
Much of an avid reader.
You wander through a forest

Of statements and assertions
Thinking the dark woods of tales
Were long ago cleared. Rustling

Claims scamper through the branches,
But somehow you’re unafraid.

Whatsoever

From a peak above thirty-five parts

Per million around 1815,

Whatsoever declined to scant five

Appearances per each million words

Of English two centuries later.

Even common none whatsoever

Is starting to feel perilously

Archaic now, when glimpsed in the wild.

What are the odds? None whatsoever,

None at all. Zero, zilch, not a chance.

It still works as intensifier

Of nothing, which is to say, a shove

As close as possible to the edge,

Infinitesimal’s synonym,

The smallest of all possible things,

The last indivisible atom,

Minimal ripple of quantum field,

Barest sliver of what’s not nothing,

Bizarrely capacious, nonetheless.

Loving anything whatsoever

Sweeps all possible phenomena,

Perhaps all conceivable as well,

Into a single category.

Let’s not abandon whatsoever—

Sure, just another word, but the one

With the thinnest slice of existence

And, as such, including every one.

Garden-Apartment Squatter

Tired of chronic dread,
Of wind and weather,
Years of exposure,

He felt blissed to find
A trick to hiding
To shelter himself—

At risk, to be sure,
Of being a mouse,
Obliteration

At the end of time
In a dark tunnel—
Still, peace for a while.

He’d found a small crack
In a weary skull
And crawled in to squat

In the shelf cellar
Of the owner’s drab
But large subconscious.

That unconscious mind
Surrounding him then
Felt dimly spacious,

Thin light from casements,
And, mercifully,
No trash or tchotchkes

Left by some former
Occupant. In fact,
He doubted there’d been

Any occupant.
Why can’t a mind, like
Many homes, contain

A serviceable
But unused basement?
Upstairs, he could hear

Decisions being
Made, conversations,
Loud entertainments,

But under the warmth
Of the well-built self,
He felt free to think,

So long as he kept
His thoughts to himself.
The only time he was

Ever nervous was
When he sensed those thoughts
Paused on the steps, tensed

And listening for
Him, or whatever
Shadow he could be,

As he tensed himself
And listened to them
Uncertain of him.

Drug of Choice

How do you live as if
You have no influence
On how you live—as if

You choose to recognize
You have no choice in what
You choose to recognize?

A warm contentment spreads
Through the body, and you
Smile, knowing that’s the drug.

Freed

The mask full of wasps

Like a broken animal,

A powered, shattered robot,

Anything that keeps twitching

In various mangled parts,

The verses are more poignant

And horrific when moving,

Although their form can’t go on.

The End of Days

You stay in this room long enough,
And you begin to understand—
It’s not you who steps in and out
Of a sunlit room. It’s the sun.

Keep the lamps to a minimum.
Electricity is lovely
In those hours you really crave it,
But it’s more fun to watch the sun,

The way the light wanders around,
Musing on the floors and ceiling,
Taking the long way to arrive
Roundabout from the moon.

At evening you try to hold on,
Especially in sunny months,
To watch the whole procedure fade,
To be there for the end of day.

First-Person Plural Dreams

Somewhere on another planet,
You were reading Ada Limón
And thinking about dreams in poems,

How well detailed we are, compared
To the poems in dreams. Never mind
How poorly we compare to life,

When detail is the measurement,
We make a better show of it—
How you were swinging in a tree,

How the exact shade of the sky
Reminded you you weren’t on Earth,
How you were pleased with your wings—

Than do the words within the dream.
There was a text. There was a text.
But beyond that, there was no next.

Just Beyond Certain of That

The world of ideology is flat
In that, as on two-dimensional maps,

A point that seems far out from the center
Neighbors points farther out, up to the edge,

Which does not abut the opposite edge—
A flat world doesn’t wrap around like that.

There’s always someone who claims the extremes
Have something in common, may even join,

But the inhabitants of the edges
Are having none of that. Their world is flat,

With always someone further out than them,
Until there’s simply none, no more, no one,

And why is it so hard to wrap your head,
Your globular, circling thoughts around that?

Things come to an end, which is or isn’t
As far out or as near as you think it—

Ideology could be infinite,
Horizons past extremes you’ll never know—

But whoever lies to the wild past you
You’re sure’s not your opposite coming back.

Put the Book Down

If your parents or grandparents
Had lived a decade or more more,
Would they have known how things turned out?
No, not hardly. There was still more.

If Nostradamus lived to now,
Would he have finished the story?
Centuries aren’t nearly enough
For prophecy to close its doors.

You think if you hang on awhile,
You’ll get to see how things turn out?
Live out a whole millennium,
You’ll end not knowing what’s in store.

Ouija No Hands

This is a new invention,

With a simpler interface.

It not only names itself,

It will rapidly spell out

Its whole history for you—

Roman coins, Saxon abbey,

A martyr’s bury, as in

Burg, borough, not burial,

Louise, wine-merchant’s daughter,

Who, when little, called herself

Wee-da, later her penname,

Ouida, popular writer,

Her image in a locket

Worn by Helen Nosworthy

The night in 1890

Helen held a seance with

Her brother-in-law’s new game,

A talking board with planchette

He was meaning to patent,

During which the board was asked

What the board thought its name was,

And it then spelled out OUIJA,

Sort of matching the locket

And the author from Bury.

You never had to touch it,

Did you? Ideomotor

Effects be damned, this new board

Only requests that you ask

Whatever you want to know.

So far, it’s mastered the past,

And holds all your dead in it,

But it knows you really want

Prediction—working on that.

The Wasting Time

Penniless, scruffy, disabled, and lost,

A runaway pondered his adjectives,

More than many years ago on St Croix,

Where he squatted down by the docks and watched

A looming cruise ship occupy the bay.

This would have been a good time to sort things,

But what remained uppermost in his mind

Was not survival, finding his way home,

Keeping whole his brittle bones, or breakfast,

None of which he grasped or had a plan for,

But how best to depict this ludicrous

Juxtaposition of island and boat,

Where the island was a low, blurred green smudge

And the boat a gleaming white colossus.

He stared up at that floating cliff of bow

And decided it was like Moby Dick

Attempting to mount a guppy. Ok.

A snarky image, sort of worked, he thought,

And he kept it in mind through subsequent

Days, weeks, months, years, and decades of somehows,

Through which, without succeeding, he survived.

Penniless, scruffy, disabled, at home

Between treatments for an advanced cancer,

A man with a ragged beard considered

Now would be a good time to sort things, if

He knew how, but what floated through his thoughts

Was that vast, blank cruise ship, just past the docks.

Fesity

Membranous, filamentous,
A collection of bubbles,
A cross-section of tissue,

It’s frothy but orderly
In ropy, repeating ways
At the scale of galaxies,

As patterned as a floodplain
After the mud’s dried and cracked,
Looking like something from it,

Looking its typical self,
Eloquent as granite cut
Into slabs for countertops.

Let’s coin a word for cosmic
Mimics how like it it is.

Infinitesimal

Flower by flower,
Design by desire—
With apologies

To Anne Stevenson—
Life gets living done,
A dreamer alone

On one iron stone,
Feeding itself selves
Living on itself.

The combination
Of extremities
Of the possible

Views of the local
That’s most difficult
To hold together

Is to believe this
Simultaneous
Superposition—

Earth, in its living,
Is both trivial,
Inconspicuous,

An irrelevance
To the universe,
And unique as well.

Dreaming

They went in search of the one
Who was doing everything.

Everyone else doing things
Were being done by that one.

The cruelest laws, the bombs,
The engineering projects,

Waltzes under chandeliers,
Shopping trips to big box stores,

The small worship services,
Selling fish by the roadside,

Blue TVs at 3am,
Furtive sex in the bushes,

And not just the human things,
However rare or common,

The weather patterns, the waves
Rushing up over the rocks,

All of it, the whole planet,
Maybe more, beyond listing—

Beyond even suggesting—
They went in search of that one.

They’d been given a hot tip.
Look for permanent sleeping,

Not comatose but dreaming,
Someone constantly dreaming.

And another tip—listen
For a communication

That you feel inside of you,
A still small voice to talk with.

So off they went, listening,
And answering, and seeking

For the one who was dreaming
Everything into being,

Everything they were doing,
All of it, even their tips.

Ships

Carried. Carried back.
The information
As a memory,

Which is not the same,
Never can be, as
The information

Of whatever made
The memory form.
So the memory

Was carried around,
Latus, borne, carried,
And now carried back,

Relatus, telling
It, relating it,
And then beginning

Or continuing,
Deepening something.
A relationship.

A person relates,
And another one
Or many relate,

And now there is more
Relationship, more
People relating,

Memories carried
Back and forth, exchange
Of information

Like waggle dances,
Like wolves licking lips,
More for the bonding

Than for the learning,
For the relating,
For relationship.

How Many Things Will Have Had Since

Thousands of years ago now,
And this is true, at least two
Thousands of years and some now,

In the cosmopolitan
Sprawl of the largest city
Of the world, a royal heir

Was born to the emperor,
An heir who would grow to be
Singularly powerful

In his era and then, too,
Powerfully singular
In retrospect, so that tales,

Legends, hagiographies,
And histories are still told
In the shadows of his bones.

But this isn’t about him
Or any of his legends.
This is a moment to pause

And think what hadn’t happened
Yet on that day he was born.
Go ahead. Try it yourself.

Push back more than two thousand
Years ago, two thousand plus
A few centuries or so.

Ask yourself, ask anyone
Or any machine that knows,
To list the calamities,

The major plagues, invasions,
Droughts, quakes, colonizations,
Religious wars, enslavements,

Inventions of new weapons,
Variations on torture,
New kinds of exploitations

That hadn’t been thought of yet,
Along with the suggestions
For ameliorations

And utter transformations
Of individual lives,
Of the systems of the world,

The philosophies, wisdom,
Arts, and sciences no one
Had yet dreamed of then, that day

The royal heir was brought forth
To shouts of adulation
Of his name, long since legend.

Pause and maybe ask yourself,
If this moment’s like that one,
As auspicious as they come,

And things go on happening,
With endings but unending,
What’s a next few thousand since?

Hold

You can say it,

Everyone can

And many do,

Many of you,

From time to time,

But you can’t hold

On to it long,

Not long enough—

Be foolish or

Be cunning. Do

Your best or do

Nothing at all,

It won’t matter.

It won’t change what

It’s done, your world.

You can say it

Like a mantra

And know it’s true,

But tomorrow,

If you get up,

You will get up

And look around

At what’s being

Done and by who,

And off you’ll go,

Convinced you’ll do

Or try to do

What’s important,

What will matter,

At least to you.

The Entire Verse Remains Obscure

With no tent, on a bedroll
With stars instead of canvas
For a ceiling, one of those

Lucky nights even you had,
Mostly alone with the world,
Wouldn’t it have alarmed you

If a melody drifted
In on a whistle, a voice,
A flute that sounded like bones,

Like a skeleton singing
Something soothing to itself?
And you’re so used to music,

Recorded, floating around,
Someone’s far-off radio,
A live concert miles away.

If you were from an era
When music was animal
Or social around a hearth,

Anything disembodied
When you were out in the night
Would have been truly spooky.

That’s literacy’s music,
The melody of small hours
Whispering like a beetle

Or a ghost between the lines,
The compressed obscurity
Of a text you almost get

From a people long since dead
That might have been clear to them
But to you sounds menacing.